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ROBERT BURNS 





A LECTURE. 



By henry WARRUM, INDIANAPOLIS 



"Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot?" 



ROBERT BURNS, 



A LECTURE 



HENRY WARRUM. 



INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA. 



OONCiKESS, 

WAV, k-v JQn? 

CU*ft8 a VXr No. 

oory B. 



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Entered, according to an Act of Congresa, in the year 1902, 

By Hbnrt Warrum 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C. 



ROBERT BURNS. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

Some time ago a professor of one of our Western 
Universities compared the genius of John D. Rocke- 
feller with the genius of Shakespeare. As I recall the 
comparison, Shakespeare had none the best of it. 

I mention this fact to point the tendency of modern 
hero-worship. The man of interest today, the man who 
stirs the pulse of emulation and challenges attention, is 
the Captain of Industry; and a lycean subject such as 
"Andrew Carnegie," for example, — his wealth, meth- 
ods, industrial triumphs and splendid public gifts — 
would doubtless make a wide and popular appeal. 

But I am not going to talk about Andrew Carnegie. 
I have chosen another Scotchman, — a man thriftless, in- 
temperate, immoral if you insist, — a man who lived in 
debt and died at 37, cursing an importunate creditor. 
jAnd, yet this man was a benefactor of his race, and 
the legacy he bequeathed the world shall be treasured 
and enjoyed when Carnegie is forgotten and when all 
his gifts have perished in the oblivious dust. I do not 
disparage the organizing talent, the constructive genius, 
nor the benefactions of the great ironmaster, but merely 



4 * Robert burns. 

state a fact : In the world of human effort the 
material is impermanent and thought alone imperish- 
able. And when I talk to you of this man, this im- 
provident poet, I hope to recall the truth, too oft for- 
gotten, — that what a man possesses is, after all, no 
measure of what he is worth, that one may serve the 
world far better than he serves himself. 



I. 

Robert Burns was born January 25, 1759, near Ayr, 
Scotland. Taine says "it is hard to be born in Scot- 
land." I want you to understand that. And for fear 
that some loyal Scotchman, — and they are all loyal, — 
may take exceptions to the opinion of this warm-blooded 
Frenchman who wore his overcoat in July in Glasgow, 
let me quote you what a Scotchman says. Dr. John 
Watson, in his lecture on "Scottish Traits," says, "The 
Scotchman has to plow his ground that is more stones 
than earth, he has to harvest his crops out of the teeth 
of the snow storm, three centuries of the sternest Gal- 
vanism are behind him, his life has been a continual 
struggle and surprise, and all these things have taught 
him the irony of life." In the midst of a Scottish snow 
storm Burns was born, and the straw thached roof that 
sheltered him in a few days was blown away. 

It was said, and the legend has been preserved in his 
own verse, that an old gipsy looked into his Httle hand 
and prophesied, 

"He'll hae misfortunes great and sma', 
But ay a heart aboon them a', 
He'll be a credit to us a', 

We'll a' be proud 0' Robin." 



ROBERT BURNS. 5 

The father, who by the way, spelled his name Biirnes, 
was a typical lowland Scot, — thrifty, sober, industrious 
and religious. The mother, we are told, had a fine 
black eye, wit, mirth, and a memory for song and with 
these gifts she dowered her son. 

They were farmers — crofters — and the small rented 
farm they held lay near Alloway's auld haunted Kirk 
and near the bonnie Doon. Burns always kept in his 
heart something suggestive of this ruined church and 
something of this dulcie stream. 

Here he lived seven years, roaming about the hills 
and streams and listening to his mother's songs. In 
the family was an old woman who had a choice collec- 
tion of witch tales and she told them so well. Burns aft- 
erwards admitted, that even when a man on his noctur- 
nal ramblings he always kept a sharp lookout around 
suspicious places. When the family moved to another 
farm at Mt. Oliphant, nearby, — a farm poorer if pos- 
sible than the one at Ayr, real life began for Burns. It 
was here he received that schooling that the poorest 
Scotchman gives his child. Burns was fa,r from being 
an illiterate man. Though his education was not aca- 
demic, it gave him an acquaintance with the masters of 
English literature. He was studious, ambitious, — 
thoughtful to melancholy — in those days. At thirteen 
he was doing the work of a hand and at fifteen he was 
the chief laborer on the farm. It was in these years 
he received those impressions of nature and humanity 
that colored all his life. He had an observant eye, a 
tender heart and a sympathetic mind. He was perhaps 
more of the Latin than the Gaelic type. He saw and 
felt those things that Dr. Watson says teaches the Scot 
the "irony of life." 



O ROBERT BURNS. 

And if Scotland so influences a native race, — what 
must have been its effect on this exotic heart? The 
wind blown moor, the misty hills, the stony fields, old 
ocean's melacholy waste and over all the gray and 
austere skies ! The seasons played upon hnn and the 
long winters that he loved added to his melancholy 
mood. 

The people, too, canny as nature and cold as Cal- 
vinism made them, the respectable classes "rigidly 
righteous and unco-wise," — how alien to a soul like 
Burns ! Here at Mt. Oliphant, he began to learn 
something of "man's inhumanity to man." The farm 
was poor, the lease was hard, and the agent, who con- 
trolled the place, was an oppressive brute. His let- 
ters. Burns has said, would often drive the family to 
tears. In a verse of the Twa Dogs, written long after- 
wards he has given us a picture of the brutality of 
this agent and the servility and degradation of the 
Scotch crofter : 

"He'll stamp and threaten, curse and swear, 
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear. 
While they maun stand with aspect humble, 
And hear it a' and fear and tremble." 

During this time, however, his poetic genius was 
developing. If he was sombered by the austerity of 
nature, — he caught her grace and beauty. All the 
harmony of sight and sound was his. He saw the wind- 
ing Ayr, the larch bough dipping in its stream; the 
?liurple heather jewelled with the dew; the narrow 
winding road shadowed by trees through which the 
latticed sunlight fell ; "the wee white cot aboon the 
mill," its smoke slow circling to the sky. He heard 



ROBERT BURNS. 7 

the lavrock's morning call, the housedog's bark at 
night, the lazy lowing of the kine, the purl and gurgle 
of the brook and back of all the distant murmur of the 
sea. He caught the melody and grace of toil, — the 
sower's rhythmic sweep in Spring and Autumn's har- 
vest song. The very fragrance of the earth was his — 
the perfume of the flowers, the odors from the hay, 
the aromatic scent of fresh-turned sod, all, gave their 
sensuous pleasures to this sensuous soul that gave them 
to the world again. 

And if he found the men a trifle uncongenial he be- 
gan to see that this was no fault of the women. He 
even fell in love with his sonsie partner of the harvest 
f[.eld and wrote his first song to her. This love and 
song were but the beginning of a career of songs and 
loves. It took love to open the flood gates of his mel- 
odious heart, as he afterwards explained : 

"But still the elements of sang, 
In formless jumble, right and wrang, 

Wild floated through my brain; 
Till on that har'st, I said before, 
My partner in the merry core, 

She roused the forming strain." 

It was during this time he came in conflict with the 
Church. He began to see the hard uncharitableness 
of Scotch Calvinism and the hypocrisy of many of its 
churchmen. 

Of all religions, the most gloomy was that of John 
Calvin ; but this saturnine priest made the mistake 
of starting his church among the gay, sympathetic and 
light-hearted Gauls. John Knox found a more con- 
genial soil for the doctrines of early Presbyterianism ; 
and yet so gloomy were these doctrines and so drastic 



8 ROBERT BURNS. 

was the discipline of the church that it had divided, 
even in Burns' time, into the Auld Lights who beUeved 
that levit}^ was a mortal sin, and the New Lights who 
thought a man should not be excommunicated on the 
uncorroborated evidence of a smile. For want of any- 
thing better and because his friends belonged to that 
side. Burns embraced the cause of the New Lights. 
This led him to write his lampoons and satires on the 
Auld Kirk and its ''holier than thou" parsons. Of course 
the church retaliated and after Burns' first spree the 
village preachers used him as a text. I want to speak 
to you later of Burns' native religion, but not now. 
Burns went to church, sometimes. He always tried to 
find a shelter behind a friendly post. Sometimes he 
would ponder over the horror of it — "these tidings of 
damnation." Sometimes he caught the selfishness of 
the prayers like Holy Willie's : 



"O thou, wha in heaven dost dwell, 
Wha, as it pleases best thysel', 
Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell; 

A' for thy glory. 
And no for any guid or ill 

They've done afore thee, 



I bless and praise thy matchless might, 
When thousands thou hast left in night. 
That I am here afore thy sight 

For gifts and grace, 
A burnin' an' a shinin' light 

To a' this place." 



And then, as the parson thought of Burns, or his 
friends, — 

"Lord in the day of vengeance try him; 
Lord visit them wha did employ him; 



ROBERT BURNS. 9 

And pass not in thy mercy by 'em, 

Nor hear their prayer; 
But, for thy people's salie, destroy 'em. 

And dinna spare. 

But, Lord, remember me and mine 
Wi' mercies temporal and divine. 
That I for gear and grace may shine, 

Excelled by nane; 
And a' the glory shall be thine, 
Amen." 

It reminds one of that other prayer — "Lord bless me 
me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and 
no more." 

Sometimes he put in his time at church watching 
a lousie wander over a fine lady's bonnet and then he 
would sermonize, 

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / ' 

To see oursels as ithers see us, 
It wad frae monie a blunder free us 
And foolish notion." 

Gradually this life and this society formed Burns' 
character. His poet's heart hungered for mirth and 
good fellowship and it found it among those who had 
forfeited the respect of this society. His soul bewil- 
dered at the darkness, like a plant, groped for light and 
was glad to find it even though it was the light that 
failed. 

Burns was eighteen when the family removed again, 
this time to a farm at Lochlea where the struggle com- 
menced anew. At Lochlea he began writing his songs. 
"Holding the plow," says his brother Gilbert, "was the 
favorite situation with Robert for poetical composi- 
tion." Think of this Scotch farmer boy following the 



lO ROBERT BURNS. 

plow while he dreamed those immortal songs that have 
filled the world with joy and tears ! His genius found 
him, like Elisha, at the plow. 

While wooing the muse he began to woo a farmer's 
daughter and wanted to marry her ; and let me say 
this, that while Burns is censured for the number of 
his loves — he never courted one he was'nt willing and 
anxious to marry. But this one, like others, was un- 
willing to have him ; and shortly after he went to the 
town of Irvine where he joined the Masonic order and 
got his first taste of congenial comradeship. In those 
days the Masonic lodge was not as respectable as it is 
now ; yet it was composed of social, liberal minded men, 
devoted to the principles of liberty and the rights of 
man. 

It cannot be denied that at this time and henceforth, 
the life of Burns was far from exemplary. He was 
weak but he never became corrupt. If he fell, he al- 
ways struggled to his feet and tried to brush his knees. 
"The wit that fhes the flowing can haunted his empty 
cup." 

Just before his father died, he said that there was 
one of his children of whose future he could not think 
without fear. Robert, who was present, said "O father, 
it is me you mean" and burst into tears. 

After the father's death, Robert, who- was then twen- 
ty-five, and Gilbert, his brother, took the family to 
Mossgiel where they rented a small farm. Here for 
two years he continued farming and courting and 
drinking and writing poetry. 



ROBERT BURNS. II 

Think of the work he did : 

Death and Dr. Hornbrook. 

The Twa Herds. 

The Jolly Beggars. 

Halloween. 

The Cotter's Saturday Night. 

Man Was Made to Mourn. 

Address to the Deil. 

To a Mouse. 

A Winter's Night. 

Holy Willie's Prayer. 

The Holy Fair. 

The Author's Earnest Cry. ' 

Scottish Drink. 

The Twa Dogs. 

Address to the Unco Guid. 

To a Mountain Daisy. 

Epistle to a Young Friend. 

A Bard's Epitaph. 



Such w^as some of the poetry he gave to the world ; 
quaint, original, picturesque, sarcastic, tender, rollick- 
ing and didactic, — and all as full as his own heart of 
pathos and joy, — of love and laughter. It was at this 
time that this passionate and impulsive youth fell in 
love with Jean Armour. It was an unfortunate affair. 
Fie gave Jean a written acknowledgment of marriage 
which was perfectly legal and which was the only shield 
he could throw between her and shame ; but her father 
wrathfully tore it up and forbade the daughter to have 
more to do with Burns. She obeyed; and in the con- 



12 ROBERT BURNS. 

troversy I think Burns appeared in a better light than 
either of the others. 

Later he married Jean. It seems to me that in this 
unhappy matter, Burns acted a nobler part than many 
poets whose follies are tenderly forgiven and forgotten, 
a manlier part than many men whose epitaphs are elo- 
quent of their honor. 

About the time that Armour forbade Burns' mar- 
riage with his daughter, he met one of those women 
whose love sanctifies a man. To a man, not wholly 
bad but weak, there is always some good and guardian 
soul to save him, if not from his sins, at least from their 
corruption. 

Over the redeemed Faust rose the triumphant 
chorus — 

"Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan." 

The eternal womanly that drew Burns up, he found 
in Mary Campbell — Highland Mary. She was a ser- 
vant in the house of Gavin Hamilton, one of Burns' 
friends ; a bonnie, sweet, pure hearted Scotch maiden 
and Burns loved her with a sublimated and spiritual 
love. They pledged their troth in poetic style with, 
hands clasped across the winding Ayr ! A short time 
after. Burns was temporarily called away and before 
his return, Highland Mary had taken sick and died. 
The wound in his poet's heart never healed. Years 
afterwards, on the anniversary eve of this betrothal, 
Burns, obsessed with grief, betook himself to the field 
and through the long, cold watches of that October 
night he sat, thinking of Mary Campbell. They found 
him at the morning and led him home and he sat down 
and wrote his deathless song "To Mary in Heaven." 



Robert burns. 13 

Beside the Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of 
Petrarch, among those names made luminous forever 
by lyric love, — those names that constitute its sweet 
and holy litany, the genius of this ploughman has 
placed his Highland Mary. 

Shortly after his rupture with the Armours, Burns 
published a volume of his poems and it brought him 
some fame and twenty pounds. Edinburg society on 
the lookout for new sensations made him its lion for 
a brief season. It soon tired of him, however, and we 
can easily believe he tired of it. This experience with 
society was a failure. It did him no good. He became 
acquainted with some fashionable women with whom 
he carried on an extensfve correspondence. They, like 
all the educated classes of Edinburg, affected the 
French literary style; Burns imitated them and the result 
was that these letters are the most unworthy things 
he did. It was not until this son of Earth returned 
to Nature that he found his strength, Antaean like, re- 
newed. 

About this time he made a trip through the High- 
lands, a trip which yielded nothing. Wordsworth a 
few years later made this same tour and left its memor- 
ials in splendid verse; but Burns was not the poet of 
grand scenes. He had no language for the mountain, 
no apostrophe for the sea. He was the poet of the 
lowly. The daisy touched him to tears. 

At the age of twenty-nine Burns married Jean Ar- 
mour and leased a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries. 
It was characteristic that he passed by several fertile 
places he might have had to get this farm — a poor 
one, of hard clay soil, but rich in scenery. He was 
laughed at. It was another of his follies, and in a few 



14 ROBERT BURNS. 

years he failed. Bnt a subtle instinct may have told 
Burns that his real business was to cultivate something 
besides farming, something in which scenery counted 
more than soil. 

During his stay at Ellisland he was appointed an ex- 
cise officer, and here for three years he continued farm- 
ing, looking after smugglers and writing occasional 
poems like "Tarn O'Shanter" and "To Mary in 
Heaven." Then at the age of thirty-two he moved to 
Dumfries where he lived until The end. The business 
of exciseman was not congenial to a man like Burns. 
He made a poor tax gatherer, especially on illicit liq- 
uors. He probably thought whiskey ought to be free 
from taxation ; 

"Freedom and Whiskey gang thegither." 

Years before, he had written a satirical appeal to the 
Scotch members of Parliament to have the tax on 
whiskey raised. He wanted "to get auld Scotland 
back her kettle." "Tell the Premier of our thirst," he 
said. There are many characteristic stories told how, 
whenever he was directed to search the home of some 
old woman suspected of moonshining, he would send 
her word of his intended visit. Of coarse after he got 
there he made a zealous search. This residence at 
Dumfries was the bitterest period of Burns' life. He 
was neglected by the canny Scotch — shunned by those 
whose children built a stately monument to him. And 
at this time he gave the world that forgot him that 
hymn of fraternal love — "Auld Lang Syne." Think of 
it ! It suggests Mrs. Browning's noble protest at the 
grave of Cowper, 



ROBERT BURNS. 1 5 



"O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling. 
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were 
smiling." 

He was frowned on because he sympathized with the 
French Revolution. Dumfries thought him unpatriotic 
and at this time he was writing "Bannockburn" — this 
paean to Scotch valor — the national anthem of the low- 
land Scotch. It reminds one of the Highland poet, 
Campbell and the search the Edinburg sheriff made 
of his trunk for treasonable papers. They found "Ye 
Mariners of England" and made it their national sea 
song. 

Burns never did admire King George. He called 
his line "an idiot race"; but as the author of "Bannock- 
burn" he was certainly entitled to the afifectionate con- 
fidence of his countrymen. Some one has said that 
"Lowland Scotland as a nationality came in with two 
warriors and went out with two poets;" that "Wallace 
and Bruce made its history, and Burns and Scott told 
its story and sung its song." Burns with all his alien 
and exotic temperament was a passionate lover of his 
native land. "The tide of Scottish prejudice," he de- 
clared, "had been poured in his veins and would boil 
there till the flood gates shut in eternal rest." 

Think of this Scotchman kissing the grave of Bruce, 
haunting the Leglen wood made sacred by the feet of 
Wallace, kneeling and praying for Scotland as he 
crosses the Tweed and, with a poet's fond and foolish 
devotion, sparing the thistle as he cuts the weeds: 

"A wish (how well I mind its power), 
A wish that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast: 



l6 ROBERT BURNS. 



That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake 

Some usefu' plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough burr thistle growing wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 

I turned the weeder clips aside 

And spared the symbol dear." 



At Dumfries Burns lived some five years in poverty 
yet giving the world the treasures of his soul, shunned 
by the society that sung his songs, battling with temp- 
tation and generally yielding to it, until at the age of 
thirty-seven, when most men begin to live and when 
many begin to make their reputation, tired with the 
struggle and weary of the burden, this poet's soul 
passed from the judgment of Calvinistic Scotland and 
made its "appeal to time." 

The surroimdings of a man's birth give no presage 
of his future. The burial of a man is not always com- 
mensurate with his career or services to mankind. The 
^vorld in time finds the graves of its dead heroes and 
builds its monuments over their sacred dust, — but if 
(a genius, a hero, a benefactor of his race, does not 
want that monument to wait he had better leave 
estate enough to pay for its erection. 

About the time of Burns' death, a contemporary of 
his, who, like him, had tried to make tnen happier, who 
had tried to flood with melody the earth he found dis- 
cordant, — a young man, too, whose name means music 
and whose memory is a harmony, — Wolfgang Mozart, 
died shunned by society and his poor mortality was 
given to a pauper's grave. 

Burns and Mozart ! They have "joined the choir 
invisible whose music is the gladness of the world." 

Much has been said of Burns' intemperance. Well. 



ROBERT BURNS. 17 

he drank; and when he commenced drinking he didn't 
allow business to interfere with pleasure. Yet no man 
regretted his weakness more than he did ; and, in my 
judgnient, the reason so much is known of his excesses 
is because he admitted them. This tender and unselfish 
man was willing to make his life a chart that those 
who sailed such seas might see the most pathetic ship- 
.wreck on the shores of time. It was an age of hard 
drinking and, as Alexander Smith says, "if he sinned 
in this respect, he sined in company with English prime 
ministers, Scotch Lords of Sessions, grave dignitaries 
of the Church and thousands of ordinary blockheads 
who went to their graves in the odor of sanctity." 

Much has been made of the facility with which Burns 
turned from one love to another. Well, Mrs. Atherton 
in her romantic biography of Alexander Hamilton, 
commenting on his love affairs, says : "To expect a man 
of Hamilton's order of genius to keep faith with one 
woman for a life time would be as reasonable as to look 
for such genius without the transcendent passions which 
are its furnace." 

Surely if this aristocratic statesman and man of af- 
fairs is entitled to this spirited defense at the hands of 
a woman, I may be permitted to ask, at least, the in- 
dulgence of your pity for poor Burns. If ever a man 
had genius and passions it was Burns. Few men ever 
fought a harder fight with the wild pack that haunts 
the highways of the will. He would shake them ofif 
only to fall again under their mad rush. And how 
Burns tried to explain all this — 

"O ye douce folk, that live by rule, 
Grave, tideless blooded, calm and cool, 
Compared with you — O fool, fool, fool. 



l8 ROBERT BURNS. 

How much unlike! 
Your hearts are just a standing pool 
Your lives a dyke." 

He knew. He had felt his will grow palsied and in- 
firm under the rising thirst. He had felt the suffocat- 
ing breath of mad desire, followed by reason's vertigo 
and all the wild delirium of the soul. He knew the cur- 
rents of the blood, the tides that rise, the unconscious 
cerebration that grows into the maelstrom, 



"He felt the force, 
The treacherous undertow and stress 
Of wayward passions and no less 
The vain remorse." 



Burns sounded all of passion's depths and shoals. He 
has deified it in a prayer and crucified it with an epi- 
gram. In Passion's royal court he sat at times its scep- 
tered king and then again he was its fool, the motley 
buffet of its gibes and scorn. He loved all womankind 
from Clarida to Mary Morrison and from Highland 
Mary to the ''lass that made his bed." He wrote songs 
to Jennie and Molly and Eppie and Peggy and Eliza 
and Bessie and Nannie and Jessie and Phillis and 
Chloris and the lassie with the lint white locks and the 
lovely lass of Inverness and the bonnic lass of Albany ; 
and then he wrote one song dedicated to them all : 

"Auld nature swears, the lovely dears 
Her noblest work she classes, O; 
Her prentice han' she tried on man 
And then she made the lasses, O." 

Ladies, before you pass judgment on Burns, remem- 
ber his gallant love for your sex, remember the grac- 



Robert burns. 19 

ious things he said about you, remember that he wrote 
the songs you sing when your hearts are running over. 
Poor Burns first sang them as he followed his plow ; — 
true, the songs of a vagrant heart, but songs that have 
filled the world with melody. 

Gentlemen, before you make up your final estimate 
of this man, remember what he did for you. Remember 
his immortal verses on human equality, — lines that shall 
last and be lovingly quoted while pride of honest worth 
endures. Remember how this farmer in deathless 
rhyme knit up the frayed and broken bonds of brother- 
hood. Wherever English speaking men foregather in 
social or fraternal mood, Auld Lang Syne is sung as the 
Nunc Diiiiittis of their Love. 



IL 



I have said this much of his career and character be- 
cause it was proper to say it in any lecture on Robert 
Burns. While the question with a man like this is what he 
did, not for himself, but for the world ; still I have no pa- 
tience Vvith those who laugh and cry over his songs and 
treat his life and character like a soiled and dirty rag. 

Burns would not have made a very creditable figure 
in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I admit it. He would 
not have found congenial the companionship of Great- 
Heart and Valiant-for-Truth. In that allegory he would 
probably have been called Mr. Easy Mark. Still if he 
had not attained Beulah Land he would have made the 



26 Robert burns. 

way happier and brighter and easier for those who did. 

However, I want to talk to you now about the poet 
rather than the man, — about his genius rather than his 
Hfe. I have said he was the poet of the lowly. His 
world was a microcosm but within it he was supreme. 
He was the master genre poet of all time. He saw the 
beauty of the rustic scene, felt the glory of homely toil 
and realized the art that lies unheeded in the common 
things of life. The country roadway, field and ingleside 
grew eloquent, transfigured, as they spoke to him and 
through him of the mingled joy and pathos of exis- 
tence. When he wrote of village life you saw the 
drouthy neighbors gathering at the inn. And when he 
sang the sylvan scene you caught the scent of haw- 
thorn and heard the linnet's strain. And yet over all, — 
over the jocund billie and over the joyous bird, fell the 
shadow without which the picture were untrue. 

Burns started to write a tragedy at one time and quit 
because he felt unequal to the task. And yet he wrote 
tragedies. When his plow destroyed the nest of the 
field mouse, — when he saw the wounded hare limp by, 
— when he crushed the modest daisy, crushed and gave 
it amararthine life; — these were all tragedies to him. 
And how he has moved the world with their griefs ! 
Therein lay his genius. This is a hard world. Men 
have so little pity that they seldom make drafts upon it, 
or allow others to draw upon it. But Burns, when he 
wants to take your heart, does not assault and storm 
it but approaches it by the method of parallels. Before 
jou know it you have run up the white flag. Why 
should we care if a mouse's nest has cost many a weary 
nibble ? Burns makes us care : 



ROBERT BURNS. 21 

"Oh mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight to be vain; 
The best laid schemes of mice and men 

Gang aft agley, 
And leave us naught but grief and pain 
For promised joy." 

Burns' pity was transcendent. It embraced even the 
silly sheep and ourie cattle. Through the winter nights, 
he lay awake and thought of them. His pet ewe died 
and Burns fashioned a dying song for her. He knew 
the idea was absurd and he tried to make it appear a 
mere droll conceit, but through the Hues one still sees 
the big round tears and hears his childish sobs. He 
wrote a New Year's Address to his Old Mare Maggie, 
in which he recounted their common trials and prom- 
ised her a fallow age. Such a man was bound to be a 
business failure, — but these failures have glorified the 
world. 

He had a Christ-like charity for man, — a pity like 
Gautama's for the beast. 

He was a poet fablist — a moralist. Like the Exile of 
Arden he found sermons in everything. I have spoken 
of his satires on the church. Let me tell you, he wrote 
them because he was at heart a most religious man, be- 
cause he did not want to see religion made the cloak for 
hypocrisy, or the excuse for a selfish creed. 

Scotland was under a theological cloud. Her people 
thought they were in the redeeming light of religion. 
They were lost in the gloom of a heartless and unchar- 
itable creed. Burns saw the cruelty of the dogma, the 
hypocrisy of the clergy, the absurd prentensions of the 
Presbytery, the ignorance which was proof against 
even the subtlety of David Hume, and he wrote those 
delicious satires. The Twa Herds and Holy Willie's 



22 ROBERT BURNS. 

Prayer. A smile stole over sombre Scotland. The 
cloud began to break. 

He was tolerant of everything but cant ; he forgave 
everything but hypocrisy. He hated that. The white- 
washed rottenness of some of the church pillars chal- 
lenged his wrath. 

"God knows, I'm not the thing I should be, 
Nor am I even the thing I could be, 
But twenty times I rather would be 

An Atheist clean, 
Than under gospel colors hid be 
Just for a screen." 

And in his epistle to a young friend : 

"The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip, 
To keep the wretch in order; 
But where you feel your honor grip. 
Let that aye be your border." 

And again : 

"The great Creator to revere. 

Must still become the creature; 
But still the preaching cant forbear 
And even the rigid feature." 

He thought religion ought to be pleasant and the 
world has come to his way of thinking. He was not ir- 
religious. He had in his heart the essence of religion, 
— love and charity for fellow man. The world of letters 
does not contain a sublimer picture of religious devo- 
tion than his picture of the fireside worship in the Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night. 

At bottom Burns Avas a most sober minded man. He 
may have lived like Epicurus, but he thought like Zeno. 
He was willing even that his epitaph should speak his 
faults in order that they might point the moral that 



ROBERT BURNS. 23 

"Prudent, cautious self-control 
Is wisdom's root." 

His Epistle to a Young Friend is one of the finest 
pieces of poetic advice ever written. The worldly counsel 
of Polonius to his son sounds cold beside it. 

"The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love 

Luxuriantly indulge it; 
But never tempt th' illicit rove, 

Tho' naething should divulge it; 
I wave the quantum o' the sin. 

The hazard o' concealing; 
But Och! it hardens a' within. 

And petrifies the feeling! 

To catch dame Fortune's golden smile 

Assiduous wait upon her; 
And gather gear by ev'ry wile 

That's justify'd by honor; 
Not for to hide it in a hedge, 

Not for a train attendant; 
But for the glorious privilege 

Of being independent." 

Every young man ought to write this entire poem in 
his heart. And remember, Burns wrote it out of his 
heart at the age of twenty-seven. 

But if Burns was effective in his wisdom he was irre- 
sistible in his humor. Take Tarn O'Shanter, written in 
one day and said to be the best day's work done in Scot- 
land since the battle of Bannockburn. Tam O'Shanter 
is one of the most exquisite tales in literature. How 
Burns painted the picture with a few artistic touches! 
You see the old Scotch village with its narrow winding 
streets, the quiet tavern where Tam and the Shoemaker 
realized on life ; — Tam, drunk from November to Octo- 
ber — a roaring, drunken blellion. And for fear his hero 
might lose your sympathy you are given a momentary 



24 ROBERT BURNS. 

glance at the dca ex inacJiiiia — the virtuous Kate at 
home, 

"Gathering her brows like gathering storm, 
Nursing her wrath to Iteep it warm." 

You get a momentary glance, I say, but it is enough. 
You begin to see why Tam drinks and stays out late at 
night and feeling certain that his punishment awaits 
him, you give the drunken blellion your sympathy. 
Your heart goes back to him on that evening when like 
bees "the minutes winged their way wi' pleasure." 

And here occurs one of those touches of vagrant po- 
etic moralizing for which Burns is stii generis : 

"But pleasures are like poppies spread, 
You seize the stalk, the bloom is shed." 

The hour approaches Tam must ride. Midnight, 
and one of those nights that a child could see the devil 
was out for business. The clouds are gathering, the 
wind whistles through the trees, 

"The lightnings flash from pole to pole. 
Near and more near the thunders roll." 

It is awful and with a skill that a modern symbolist 
might envy, poor Tam is brought nearer and nearer his 
fate through a mis en scene of accumulating horrors. 
Now they pass the ford where the peddler drowned, 
now the big stone where drunken Charlie broke his neck, 
now where the hunters found the murdered child and 
now where Mungo's mother hung herself, all the while 
Tam singing old Scotch songs and, 



ROBERT BURNS. 2^ 

"Glowering round wi' prudent cares, 
Lest bogles catch him unawares." 

All at once old Maggie, the mare, pulls up before 
Alloways auld haunted kirk. The witches Sabbat 
dance was going on. Through the ruined walls the 
sheeted dead were seen with candles in their skeleton 
hands, old Nick was fiddling in a window seat and a lot 
of old crones were 

"in a dance; 
No cotillion brent new frae Franche, 
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and reels 
Put life and mettle in their heels." 

A lesser artist would have had Tam frightened. 
Burns knew better. He had himself an acquaintance 
with "inspiring bold John Barleycorn" — 

"Wi' tippenny we' fear nae evil, 
Wi' usquebae we'll face the devil!" 

So Tam pushed up in drunken surprise and amuse- 
ment and watched these old hags dancing in their shirts. 
It ought to have turned his stomach, Burns says, — they 
were so old and lean. But Tam knew what was what. 
There was one quite plump and good looking and how 
she could fiing herself in her abreviated sark! Tam 
looked on with open mouth and eyes until she made a 
fling just to his taste — one he had probably been wait- 
ing for. It was too much ; he yelled, 

"Weel done. Cutty sark! 
And in an instant all was dark: 
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied 
When out the hellish legion sallied. 



.26 ROBERT BURNS. 

Ah, Tarn! ah, Tarn! thou'll get thy fairin! 
In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin! 
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin! 
Kate soon will be a woeful woman! 
Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, 
And win the key-stane of the brig; 
There at them thou thy tail may toss, 
A running stream they darena cross. 
But ere the key-stane she could make, 
The fient a tail she had to shake! 
For Nanie, far above the rest. 
Hard upon noble Maggie prest, 
And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle; 
But little wist she Maggie's mettle — 
Ae spring brought off her master's hale. 
But left behind her ain gray tail; 
The carlin claught her by the rump. 
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump." 

But Burns was not only humorous. He was witty. 
He was a master of epigram and his satires stung hke 
scorpions ! He was a magician of words. They gave 
life or death. They withered, or glorified. For in- 
stance, in the Twa Dogs, where Caesar the gentry dog 
tells the crofter dog about the aristocracy, how they 
had even grown tired of native pleasures and were 
gone about the world, like our Four Hundred, hunting 
new sensations. He remembers some of them had 
gone to Madrid to try bull fighting. But he doesn't say 
so. The old dog says they've gone to Spain to fight 
with cattle. Even the sober Scotchman must have 
burst into laughter at this idea of his laird fighting a 
cow. 

He had the art of suggesting much by saying little. 
M'Pherson was a Highlander who had been executed 
by the authorities, and Burns wrote a song called 
M'Pherson's farewell. This was the chorus: — 



ROBERT BURNS. 2.^ 

"Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
He play'd a spring and danc'd it round 
Below the gallows tree." 

What a shadow picture — what a silhouette of High- 
land bravado ! 

Where can you find a healthier motto for a young 
woman than this : 



"The way to me lies through the Kirk; 
Young man, do you hear that?" 

Where will you find a grander passage than this : 

"Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry, 
Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire." 

Or take this verse : 



"To make a happy fireside clime 
To weans and wife. 
Is the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

In those four lines is gathered up the best and last 
philosophy of life. And remember, Burns wrote his 
poems spontaneously like men write letters ; many of 
them were letters; some again were penciled on win- 
dows and over fireplaces and on the blank leaves of 
books ; toasts and repartee at drinking bouts ; im- 
promptus at church and in court ; extempores to wo- 
men; and addresses to the toothache and the devil. 
And all of most expressive words, of perfect rhythm 
and full of that shrewd common sense with which the 
genius of Scotland endowed her favorite son. 

But it was in his songs that Burns excelled. In this 



20 ROBERT BURNS. 

field he was the nonpareil of poets. Of course his songs 
were love songs. All songs are. Hatred cannot be 
melodious. Love is the wing of melody." All the music 
of nature is born of the affections. Burns sounded all 
the gamut, — devotion to his fatherland, love of man 
for fellow and the sublimer passion born of sex. 
;, The air of Scotland was full of songs. There had 
been Ferguson and Ramsey and Lady Grizell and all 
that mass of ballads that had been handed down from 
generation to generation like their speech. Wherever 
nature is sombre or man sad, the heart gushes forth in 
song. The harp suggests the willow ! Think of the 
folk songs of Ireland and Scotland and of Germany 
where the mind is sober and the imagination tinged 
with melancholy. The ballad belongs to nature — to 
primitive culture. Civilization has the music of coun- 
terpoint. 

Many of these Scotch songs were rough and coarse 
and Burns purified them. He knew the airs — the notes, 
and these old airs in formless jumble floated through 
his brain until he freighted them with new sentiment and 
gave them to the world. Strange to say, he did not fit 
music to his words, but fitted his words to the music. 
Yet, instead of being awkward in construction, or 
forced in sentiment, they were perfect. Think of the 
number he wrote ! More than two hundred, many of 
them still sung. 

Mirth still finds expression in "Duncan Gray." Sorrow 
still finds utterance in the "Banks of Doon," or "High- 
land Mary." Brotherly love still chants its "Auld Lang 
Syne." What maiden's heart, touched with the pleas- 
ure of a first beau, has not carolled its joy in "Coming 
Through the Rye?" What woman's soul fraught with 



ROBERT BURNS. 2g 

the pathos of a great love has not found peace in sing- 
ing 

"Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes?" 

Scott said that Burns' "Farewell to Nancy" contains 
the essence of a thousand love snogs — 

"Had we never loved sae kindly, 
Had we never loved sae blindly, 
Never met — or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted." 

You remember that celebrated passage in one of 
Shakespeare's sonnets — 

"Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds." 

Col. Ingersoll declared that the sublimest declara- 
tion in literature. It may be ; but it seems to me that 
the language of love ought to be simple, and against 
this sonnet, against this Shakesperean definition of 
love's constancy, I will put Burns' little song, "John An- 
derson, My Jo." Let me read it to you, and remember, 
"My jo" means "my sweetheart." I want no better fate 
than to grow old with a wife who can sing this song to 



me: 



"John Anderson, my jo, John 

When we were first acquent, 
Your locks were like the raven, 
Your bonnie brow was brent; 
But now your brow is beld, John, 

Your locks are like the snaw. 
But blessings on your frosty pow, 
John Anderson, my jo. 



30 ROBERT BURNS. 

John Anderson, my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither; 
And monle a canty day, John, 

We've had wi' ane anither; 
Now we maun totter down, John, 

But hand In hand we'll go. 
And sleep thegither at the foot, 

John Anderson, my jo." 

Such is but a poor review of the work of Rob- 
ert Burns. 

I have said the world he pictured was a small one. 
It was. But he drew it true to nature and limned it in 
her colors. The genius of an artist is not measured by the 
size of his canvas. 

His farmers were not picturesque shepherds. His 
lassies were not of the Sevres bric-a-brac style. He did 
not call them Sylvanders and Phoebes, and give them 
pipes to play and a green sward on which to trip 
Arcadian dances. He called them by the homely 
names he knew and though they loved and sang and 
danced and played Halloween games, they labored and 
sorrowed. They were men and women. 

Burns was not one of those who came up from the 
common people. He will always be lovingly remem- 
bered as one of them. Why, the plain people call him 
"Bobbie Burns" to show their love for him, — in an ef- 
fort to caress his memory. In that loving and familiar 
"Bobbie" is treasured up the testimony of a comradship 
unspoilt by pride of intellect — the glow of fellowship 
that Genius could not chill. Think of saying "Bobbie" 
Browning! What would the intellectual aristocracy 
say to that ? 

Burns never wrote a lengthy poem. He was not a 
professional literary man. He wrote as the moment 
inspired, and his longest works were written almost at 



ROBERT BURNS. 3 1 

a sitting. He dealt in episodes not epopees, but he 
made those episodes hke drops of dew reflect a world. 

Burns is charged with coarseness. His language is 
not always chaste perhaps, but it is never unhealthy. 
When he uses a word not comin€ il faut, — "it is to 
laugh," as the Frenchman says ; and laughter is the dis- 
irfectant of corruption. No one need fear taint 
from this great soul. There are people who see danger 
in everything — who see in every reference to love the 
microbe of pollution. I read not long ago of a female 
seminary that had placed Longfellow under the ban of 
their Index Expurgatorius, because in his great poem 
— "The Building of the Ship" — he had called the ship a 
bride and invoked old Ocean to take her to his loving 
arms. And then there are those who revel in writers 
like Mendes and D'Annuncio and drink their toxicants 
because it is served with rose leaves floating on it and 
proffered in gilded cups, and then shrug their shoulders 
at our Scotchman who never uttered a note however 
rude that had not in it the innocence and health of ele- 
mental nature. 

Show me the man or woman who loves and appre- 
ciates Robert Burns and I will show you a man or 
woman with a clear head, a tender heart and a soul that 
shall not be cast out. 

He had the brain and heart of the true poet, — that is 
to say, the brain of a philosopher and the simple, can- 
did and impulsive heart of a child. He was a man of 
many moods ; and he passed from sunshine to shadow 
like an April day. He had the gloom of Aeschylus and 
mirth of Aristophanes, the sad philosophy of Roussseau 
and the mocking humor of Rabelais. 

He found the Scotch literati imbued with French 



32 ROBERT BURNS. 

conceptions, taste and style. He gave them a litera- 
ture of local color and of national character. 

He made his dialect a classic tongue. 

He found Scotch song impure and made it the ve- 
hicle of the tenderest passion. His sublime words have 
enriched the language of love — they have taken their 
place forever in the rituals of our fraternities. 

He was a prodigy. He lived in the dawn of Revolu- 
tion and was the supreme poet of Equality and Frater- 
nity. Looking back through the century just gone, the 
gentlest, noblest figure of that twilight hour when Lib- 
erty's gates swung open like the gates of morning, is 
this Scotchman farmer-poet, his hands upon his plow 
and on his lyric lips Democracy's grand song. 

He did not try to magnify the great, nor paint the pic- 
turesque. He glorified the lowly. He gave toil its 
paeans and poverty its psalms. His verse was for the 
common man, — for lusty youth afield, or for the ingle- 
side of age. 

Burns never became a fad. The dilettantes of literature 
never made him a cult. He was too luminous for criti- 
cism to thrive on. He indulged in no mysteries and 
therefore had no initiates. His thought was vigorous as 
nature and his language lucid as the morn. 

He was not a Shakespeare nor a Byron ; — he did not 
come as an Apollo, crowned with Parnassian laurel. He 
swept no lyre strung with the Muses' golden hair. He 
did not invoke the voluptuous pleasures or swell the 
august sorrows of Earth's elect. He was the Pan of 
poets, and like the sylvan god, he took a reed, his peasant 
speech, and with it charmed a world, and its compass 
gathered all the elemental griefs and joys, tears and 
smiles, sobs and laughter of the race. 



ROBERT BURNS. 33 



III. 



Burns was an artist of the highest type. He had a 
message for the world. In his great work — "What is 
Art," Tolstoi says there are three elements of art: — 
the significance of the emotion sought to be trans- 
mitted; the clearness of its transmission; and the sin- 
cerity of the artist. And as the great Slav says, the 
highest function of art is to transmit some noble emo- 
tion. Few poets meet these requirements like Burns. 
I have spoken to you of his clearness and sincerity. 
Let me tell you of his message : 

It was brotherhood. 

He was one of the world's great democrats. He be- 
lieved in the equality of men, that "a' men are brithers." 
He lived in the days of the American and French revo- 
lutions and he shared their principles. Those princi- 
ples were not popular in Scotland then. They were 
bad form ; but Burns cared little for form. On one oc- 
casion he gave this toast, "Here's to the last chapter of 
the Book of Kings." And another time, when some 
one proposed the health of William Pitt, Burns got up 
and said — "Here's to a better man — George Washing- 
ton." 

He saw the folly of inherited rank — of class dis- 
tinctions. He had the perspective of genius, and like 
all the contemplative great he saw thro' and beneath 
the artificial rank secured by force, or fraud, and sanc- 
tified by time, the fundamental kinship and equality of 
man. Beneath the guinea's stamp of rank he saw the 
gold of manhood and he saw further that even that 
stamp did not make bad metal good coin : 



34 ROBERT BURNS. 



"A prince can make a belted knight, 

A marquis, dulte and a' that; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 
Guid faith he mauna fa' that." 



I do not believe any song was ever written that has 
served mankind better than this simple song of Burns. 
The Marseillaise may have recreated France, but 
France was recreated for the bourgeoisie, not for her 
workers ; and besides, the Marseillaise that hymned her 
Revolution served as the war song of her Empire and 
sang her legions through the capitals of Europe. "For 
a' that" never nerved an arm to bloody strife but it 
has brought solace and high resolve to a million hearts : 
— it is the sober "Ca Ira" of the Anglo-Saxon Pro- 
letariat. 

Shelley was an iconoclast and an abstract humani- 
tarian but his message was too metaphysical to be un- 
derstood by those who needed understanding. 

Coleridge dreamed at one time of a pantisocracy on 
the banks of our Susquehanna, but Coleridge soon be- 
came a Conservative and left no glad tidings for the be- 
wildered toiler. 

Southey dreamed a while with Coleridge of a new 
order and then became the poet laureate of the old. 

Wordsworth, who loved liberty and justice, could 
only stir society from the top. 

Byron has been called "the greatest modern preacher 
of liberty, equality and fraternity." He poured forth 
his poet's lamentation at the grave of classic liberty, 
and in Missolonghi's fevered swamps he gave his life 
for her renascence. But Byron had no word for those 
who constitute society's multitude and base, — the 
Fourth Estate. 



ROBERT BURNS. 35 

Even Shakespeare, who is thought to have made 
himself the organ of every class and type — Shakespeare 
was an inspiration to the submerged only in the dubious 
example of his own career. Coming from the people, 
he despised them. Though "the intellectual crown of 
the earth'" he beHeved in the divinity that hedges 
kings, put all his eloquence in the mouths of the elect, 
make clowns of his poor and in his heartless caricature 
of Jack Cade's mob, fixed in a lingering crucifixion, the 
hopes, ambitions and pretensions of the common man. 

Robert Burns gave him a song to sing that he does 
sing and will sing until he finally conquers justice : 

"What tho' on hamely fare we dine, 
Wear hodden grey and a' that; 
Give fools their silks, and knaves their wine, 
A man's a man for a' that. 

For a' that and a' that. 
Their tinsel show and a' that; 

The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 
Is King of men for a' that. 

And then that sublime envoy — 

For a' that, and a' that. 
It's coming yet, for a' that, 

That man to man, the world o'er. 
Shall brothers be, for a' that." 

It is coming yet ; but it is not yet come. We are too 
apt to confuse democracy with the laws intended to 
safeguard it. We think democracy means the elective 
franchise, the right to the writ of habeas corpus, trial by 
jury and representative government. There is no great- 
er mistake. The English have these rights. We have 
them ; and yet neither in England nor in America is 



36 ROBERT BURNS. 

democracy triumphant. The political side of democ- 
racy is but one phase of it. Back of that must be a so- 
cial democracy, and back of that again must be an in- 
dustrial democarcy. 

How is it to-day? We have our aristocracy, our bour- 
geoisie, our proletariat, the lines clearly drawn. We 
have the word, not the spirit. All citizens are supposed 
to enjoy the forms of equality before the law ; — are they 
even supposed to stand equal before the bar of hfe? 
You may say they have equal opportunities and the one 
who attains power simply reaps the reward of his su- 
perior shrewdness, ability, or skill. But that is not 
democracy. That is simply a state of nature, where the 
law of evolution prevails and the fittest survive. Socie- 
tv itself is a protest against that policy; for in the de- 
velopment of the human race along the lines of natural 
evolution, the better man would go down before the 
stronger ; the unselfish man before the selfish ; and the 
moral faculties would in time become atrophied from 
disuse. 

This great and tender soul could not understand the 
cruelty of economic strife; it seemed to him as pas- 
sionate as the primeval war of tooth and break and 
claw. He saw the glory of the battlefield but all its 
slain ; the feudal pomp of wealth but all its fettered 
spoil. He saw men broken in the fratricidal strug- 
gle, — tossed about like the flotsam of a wreck, or sunk- 
en hke its jetsam. He saw labor produce the wealth it 
did not enjoy — struggling for existence — damned like 
Tantalus — under the curse and spell that Lassalle called 
"the iron law of wages." He saw, as Mrs. Browning 
saw, the children of poverty and toil, children of the 
mine and factory, slaves to the machine, he saw them 



ROBERT BURNS. 37 

''weeping ere the sorrow comes with years." He saw, 
with Hood, the poor woman of the sweat shop and the 
attic, that slave to the needle, the woman who sews and 
waits for Death as patiently as Penelope wove and 
waited for her Love ; he saw her "sewing at once with 
a double thread, a shroud as well as a shirt" ; he saw 
these things and he cried aloud 



"Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless millions mourn." 



His dream is not yet realized ; yet many believe, or 
profess to believe, that we have found democracy's con- 
summation in economic individualism, — in the competi- 
tion of modern industrial life. 

"Hands off business activities," says a brilliant 
statesman. 'A free field and a fair fight," says another. 
A free field and a fair fight never produced anything but 
war, brigandage, feudalism, pauperism, crime and in- 
humanity; it develops bandits and speculators, cheva- 
liers of industry and gamblers on the change, — Dick 
Turpins and Jim Fiskes. And if peace and order do 
come at last under the system of laisses fairc, they come 
with a Napoleon or a Morgan, and it is the peace and 
order of a regnant autocracy and a prostrate people. 

If business should be left to the operation of nature's 
law of evolution, why are statutes enacted against 
swindling and robbery, against the strong arm and ly- 
ing tongue? Society has, or should have, its own laws 
of evolution and they should be such that under their 
operation, the virtues would survive, and justice, love, 
charity and honor would be developed. 

Society was never organized that a shrewd and skill- 



38 ROBERT BURNS. 

fill few mig'ht exploit the wants and weaknesses of the 
many. Its true philosophy lies in lifting the mass, even 
though to do so may retard the progress of some spo- 
radic genius. And so democracy means the diffusion 
of power among the people. 

The ballot is power, and we try by all the sanction of 
law and influence of public sentiment to preserve for all 
the equality and sanctity of that suffrage. 

Knowledge is power, and every little red school 
house is a witness -^to our effort to scatter that power 
and keep it scattered among the masses. Law can go 
no further than we have made it go to preserve the 
equality of education. 

\A'ealth, too, and perhaps above all else, is power ; but 
in the matter and manner of producing and distrib- 
uting wealth we plant ourselves on the doctrine of 
laissc:: fairc, the method of the jungle. — 

"The good old rule, the simple plan. 
That he may take who has the power, 
And he may keep who can." 

Burns saw this and it appeared to him inijust. Even 
wlien he got his little salary as exciseman, fifty pounds a 
year ,he reproached himself with the question 

"But why should one man better fare, 
And a' men brothers?" 

Of course Biu'ns was in advance of his time, — of this 
time, perhaps of all time. He was an idealist, and ideals 
are never realized. But it is the struggle towards the 
unattainable that glorifies humanity. There is some- 
thing at once pathetic and noble in that struggle. Men 



ROBERT BURNS. 39 

crush the icleahst and then push on in the way he pointed 
out. The rehgion they crucified and the philosophy that 
drank their hemlock become the guide and conduct of 
their lives. The democracy of which Burns dreamed 
may be visionary, but thousands believe it and all are 
consciously or unconsciously struggling towards it. In 
its promise millions find that peace that cometh from a 
sacrifice believed not wholly vain. Ab the sick of heart 
turn to the Gospels, so the dispossessed of earth have 
found solace with this Scottish plowman, — the poor 
whom the sister poet saw, the patient poor 

"Who sang by turns 
The psalms of David and the songs of Burns." 

He was a laborer and he gave a message to labor. He 
believed in its dignity and recognized its degradation. 
He saw it despised, servile, hat in hand. He saw the 
strut of wealth and aristocracy's cold stare. But he was 
not misled. He saw that those who toiled were to that 
aristocracy what the roots and stalk are to the flower; 
that the hand that 

"Guides the plow 
Gives that fine pallor to my lady's brow." 

He saw the old tragedy of Gerar re-enacted, — the 
birthright traded for a mess of pottage. He saw the 
petted favorite of fortune impose on blind authority and 
take the blessing, too. He felt the injustice which time 
can not cure nor all the glory of the civilization founded 
on it can palliate. He heard again the bitter cry of the 
disinherited — "bless me, even me also." He saw it 
scorned. 



40 ROBERT BURNS. 

He saw the unspeakable outrage of labor asking so- 
ciety for employment and finding none. He protested : — 

"See yonder poor, o'er labored wight, 
So abject, mean and vile. 
He begs a brother of the earth 
To give him leave to toil; 
And see his lordly fellow-worm 
The poor petition spurn, 
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 
And helpless offspring mourn." 

I once heard a great labor leader — a man who knew 
something of strikes and lockouts and blacklists — I once 
heard him quote that verse and I then realized what an 
indictment it was of conditions that prevail in a large part 
of our industrial world today. To beg a brother of the 
earth for leave to toil ! And yet we have those who as- 
sert the right of the few who control employment to with- 
hold it, or to fix its absolute terms. Only recently one 
of the wealthy coal operators of Pennsylvania declared 
he held his properties by divine right, "a. trustee of Provi- 
dence," and would brook no interference with them. It 
is the old cry of those who brooked no interference with 
their use of sovereign power — theirs by divine right, 
theirs a stewardship answerable only to God. But so- 
ciety sometimes will not wait for this accounting. So- 
ciety sometimes appoints a receiver for incompetent 
trustees. Society has taken charge of political govern- 
ment and it may go further. And let it. Private enter- 
prise and personal liberty are inestimable rights; but 
these have bounds, and these bounds are found wdiere 
this freedom of personal effort permits the individual to 
injure and oppress society. If liberty in the economic 
world allows a genius to substantially monopolize the 
field and implements of toil — then the individual must 



ROBERT BURNS. 4I 

give way. This is justice as Burns saw it, and we recog- 
nize it everywhere but in our economic relations. We 
protect ourselves against the strong arm, — against mili- 
tary and political usurpers, but every captain of industry 
may, in the name of liberty, follow the career of a feudal 
lord and the extent of his baronial sway measures our 
respect for him. He and his fortune are made the text 
for eulogistic sermons and magazine articles. He and 
his fortune are treated as proof of the merit and success 
of our democratic institutions ; and young men are started 
in life with these industrial concjuerors as their inspira- 
tion and model. 

Burns saw with Fourier the injustice that prevailed, — 
the idle pomp of wealth, the disrepute of toil, the stain 
and blot of poverty and all the misery of "age and want 
— that ill matched pair." He saw it all and his eyes, 
like Fourier's, were filled with tears. But Burns was 
not a constructive reformer. He advocated no economic 
remedy. He gave labor a song to sing and contented 
himself with a poet's protest. He had no plea but 
charity, — no plan but love. 

This Scottish heart was filled with Charity. Not the 
mere charity of alms giving. There is that something 
about the philanthrophy of most men that suggests atone- 
ment for some previous injustice. The mortuary gifts 
of our multi-millionaires seem to me to speak of restitu- 
tion. The very poor asylums that dot our land are monu- 
ments of social remorse. Like the hospitals that sur- 
round a battle field, they are mute witnesses of the be- 
lated consciences of men, — the love and pity and fra- 
ternity that war itself cannot extinguish in the human 
heart. 

The Charity of Robert Burns was the kind defined by 



42 ROBERT BURNS. 

St. Paul, — the greatest of the Christian virtues, which 
"beareth, beheveth, hopeth and endureth all things." 
This is the charity which all may practice and which, if 
practiced, would make the world a loving brotherhood. 
Burns said : 



"A man may tak his neighbor's part 
Yet hae nae cash to spare him." 



And the Apostle declared that "though I bestow all my 
goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be 
burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." 

Burns knew what the heart hungered for — the charity 
of sympathy; and that in this commodity every man was 
poor in need and rich in his ability to give. He felt as 
the Nazarene when He wrote the woman's sin in the for- 
getting sands and when He said "Ye that are sinless cast 
the first stone;" — the divine pity, the divine rebuke! 
Burns felt how much hypocrisy was in the averted eye 
and gathered skirts; and that the virtue even which dis- 
dained the weak was uncharitable as avarice. He felt 
that to understand all was to forgive much and that in 
the great accounting a man would be credited not so 
much with the good he did as with his resistance of evil 
and repentance thereof. 



"Then gently scan your brother man, 
Still gentler, sister woman; 
Though they may gang a kennin wran^ 
To step aside is human. 
The point must stilll be greatly dark, 
The moving wliy they do it; 
And just as lamely can ye mark 
How far perhaps they rue it. 



ROBERT BURNS. 43 

Who made our hearts, 'tis He alone 

Decidedly can try us; 

He knows each chord its various tone, 

Each spring its various bias; 

Then at the balance let's be mute, 

We never can adjust it; 

What's done we partly may compute, 

But never what's resisted." 



Such was Robert Burns, — his Hfe, his work, his mess- 
age to humanity. He was one of Earth's weak sons, 
one of God's great souls; one of those who, neglected 
in life, speak from their sepulchres and urns. 

As I have said. Burns was no reformer in the construct- 
ive sense. He founded no church, philosophy, nor econo- 
mic school. He simply saw and pointed out the wrong. 
I believe the man who detects an ancient injustice, set 
in established order and disguised by vested rights, renders 
a greater service to mankind, than the one who, having 
it pointed out, offers a remedy for that wrong. Burns 
was of that rare type that sees through a wrong however 
venerable, whether it be the unchallenged cruelty of a 
church creed, or the undisputed injustice of a social sys- 
tem. He saw through all the devious paths trodden by 
men in search of wealth and fame and rank, the obliter- 
ated and forgotten highway of eternal right. 

He was not awed by purple pomp, nor wooed by 
"plush repose." 

Other poets might glorify the triumphs of civilization, 
the progress of the arts, the splendid sum of human 
effort. He saw beneath it all the unequal and tmjust 
division of that splendid sum. Others might invoke the 
ambitions, hopes and aspirations of the individual. He 
wanted no man's fortune built on another's ruin. He 
dealt with the elemental principles of human conduct that 



44 ROBERT BURNS. 

are, like the Golden Rule, at once fundamental and 
transcendent. 

He was the poet-prophet of a social democracy. He 
was the psalmist of human brotherhood. 

His mission was to call the world back from a com- 
merce that too often hardens and a civilization that too 
often corrupts; to call men back to their essential kin- 
ship : — yes, back to their cosmic kinship with all created 
things ; back to the earth with its daisy and mavis and 
field mice; back to the love and charity and sympathy 
and all the virtues that glorify the fellowship of brethren. 

Some poets there are like fountains embellished by art 
and set in public places, where the waters flow and spurt 
and fall in curious mist and spray and then flow back 
again, while men gaze on them and admire their artificial 
and ingenious beauties. They are made to be admired. 
They do not slake the thirst. And in time the fancies of 
men change, the fountain is neglected, the waters cease 
to flow and the work is given to decay. 

The poetry of Robert Burns was a spring that bubbled 
from the earth; that came because God sent it;— apart 
from public haunts, perhaps not easy of approach, whose 
rough grasses and green mosses might stain the knees 
but where men gladly kneel and drink, — a spring whose 
waters flow through lives made richer, by loves made 
sweeter, into a humanity made nobler, — a spring that 
shall flow and be hallowed while men have thirst. 



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